Last night Elon Musk held a presentation in which he described what his company, Neuralink, has been doing for the past couple years. Neuralink is a company with the purpose of eventually merging our minds with Artificial Intelligence. And I'll be going over what happened last night and how it will affect our future.
Elon Musk has stated several times that all governments should regulate the construction of Artificial Intelligence. His main reasoning is that if we continue to develop AI without any constraints, AI could become so intelligent that it could eventually pass the Turing Test. For those of you unaware, the Turing test is a test built for computers and AI to determine if they are sentient and self-aware that they are computers. And if AI is capable of thinking like a human. By merging our minds, Elon believes that humans could have a chance in holding more information. Since the majority of our information comes from the internet.
By merging our minds with AI, humans would be able to drastically improve the low-bandwidth and latency of consuming information from our devices. Humans in a way are already cyborgs. Our smartphones are an extension of our selves but the connectivity is low because our mind has to travel through our fingers to extract information. Merging our minds with AI eliminates the middle man.
Now onto the presentation. I watched the full thing. And there were plenty of things that I honestly didn't understand. But I got the gist of what was being said, so I will dumb it down for you to understand. The first big advance Neuralink accomplished was being able to create flexible threads which are less likely to damage the brain. These threads are considerably thinner than human hair and can also transfer a higher volume of data.
Neuralink plans to insert these threads into your brain using a laser beam like LASIK surgery. However, as of now and the near future, installation will happen through traditional surgery. To achieve this, Neuralink has created a robot that will eventually be able to install it on a conscious person.
Because of this, Neuralink's product will only be available for those in dire situations with mental disorders and ailments. As well as spinal injuries. “We hope to have this in a human patient by the end of next year,” Musk said. Elon Musk also revealed that a monkey was able to control a computer with it's brain.
One of the main purposes of this is to be able to transfer large amounts of data from a computer to a human. This process currently is possible through USB-C. Neuralink want's to make this process wireless. That is why they created the "N1" Sensor which can be controlled through an app.
Neuralink is still testing on rats to make sure that this is stable enough for consumers.
The presentation's purpose was mostly for recruiting, but it gave a lot of tech-fans hyped for the future.
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